When Teachers Take It to the Curb, Ask Why the Pie Is So Small

At this week’s PVPUSD Board meeting, several teachers stood at the podium during public comment to describe, in plain terms, what it's like to work in this district right now. A 26-year veteran at Soleado talked about arriving to a heat wave with no working AC, then a flooded classroom the following week, before saying simply, "We all deserve to be paid what we're worth." A 23-year teacher described standing at the gas pump doing the math on her own commute, and closed with, "Give us a fair deal. That's all we're asking for." A single mother teaching TK told the board she's taken on two extra part-time jobs "to pay my bills." A 30-year teacher, whose own parents bought a home in Manhattan Beach on two teaching salaries in 1963, put it this way: "Loyalty is not a substitute for fair compensation, and dedication is not a discount." Another, 22 years in, was blunter still: "My wage is not a living wage." A 14-year teacher told the board it was "time to put your money where your mouth is — literally." And a 25-year teacher, watching her health premiums climb 23% next year on a frozen salary schedule, said flatly, "My actual compensation is going backwards."

Then PVFA President Sam Weiss took the podium for the union's regular report and raised the stakes further. If the district doesn't reach a fair settlement, she said, teachers will be "out on the curb" Tuesday morning at the front of every school, with flyers and posters, talking to the parents dropping their kids off. "We are a team. We're here. We're doing the work. We're organized. We're tired," she said. "And we're not going away until we get our due."

I don't take that kind of pressure campaign lightly, and neither should this board. When 30-year veterans who have taught through six superintendents are standing up to say they've had enough, that's not noise — it's a signal that something structural is broken.

Here's the problem: everyone at that podium last night, and everyone on the dais, is arguing over how to divide a budget that is too small to begin with. I've written before about PVPUSD's previous $1.5 million structural deficit, and about the fact that our district receives about $4,500 less per student than the state average — which works out to roughly $45 million a year we don't have, simply because of how Sacramento allocates LCFF dollars. That gap doesn't show up as a line item anyone points to during negotiations, but it's the reason every pay increase the board offers feels like it's coming out of somewhere else, like a maintenance budget or a reserve account the district is rightly hesitant to dip into.

And yet, listening to last night's meeting, nobody is talking about the revenue side of this equation. The entire conversation is about how to split an undersized pie: what percentage increase the district can afford, what health benefit contribution is realistic, what the reserve policy allows. Those are legitimate questions. But if PVPUSD is negotiating from a base that's already $45 million light compared to the state average, we are having the wrong argument. We should not be asking teachers and the district to fight each other over scraps when the actual shortfall is upstream, in Sacramento, in a funding formula that has never been seriously challenged by this board.

This is exactly why I believe the external functions of the school board — the advocacy, coalition-building, and legislative engagement that happens outside the boardroom — deserve to be treated as core board work, not an afterthought. A school board's job isn't only to manage the budget it's handed; it's to fight for a better one. That means joining or leading a coalition of similarly underfunded districts to press Sacramento on the inequitable LCFF distribution, rather than waiting on statewide efforts we don't control. It means being honest with our community that "fiscal responsibility" cannot be the whole answer when the funding formula itself puts us behind before the first dollar is spent.

If we did that work seriously, this wouldn't be a once-a-cycle scramble to find room in the budget for a fair settlement. We'd have the resources to actually keep pace with COLA, to attract new teachers and give the veterans in that room last night a reason to stay for another 20 or 30 years, instead of standing at a podium asking us to stop treating dedication as a discount.

No teacher should have to make their case to parents in a busy drop-off line in order to be paid fairly for teaching in a school they love. I want a board that spends as much energy fighting for PVPUSD's fair share from the state as it spends managing the shortfall once that fight has been skipped.  If elected, I will push this board to treat fighting for fair state funding as core business, so our teachers never have to make this case at drop-off again.